Saturday, October 31, 2015

As I have noted on here for five years now, the making of books about Origen shows no sign of letting up. This at once brilliant, controverted, and likely maltreated Alexandrian father, dead nearly 1800 years, continues to exert influence on the Church both East and West. A recent reprint of a book originally published in 2012 helps us understand Origen's theodicy: Mark S.M. Scott, Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil(Oxford UP, 2015), 252pp.

About this book the publisher tells us

Journey Back to God explores Origen of Alexandria's creative, complex, and controversial treatment of the problem of evil. It argues that his layered cosmology functions as a theodicy that deciphers deeper meaning beneath cosmic disparity. Origen asks: why does God create a world where some suffer more than others? On the surface, the unfair arrangement of the world defies theological coherence. In order to defend divine justice against the charge of cosmic mismanagement, Origen develops a theological cosmology that explains the ontological status and origin of evil as well as its cosmic implications. Origen's theodicy hinges on the journey of the soul back to God. Its themes correlate with the soul's creation, fall and descent into materiality, gradual purification, and eventual divinization. The world, for Origen, functions as a school and hospital for the soul where it undergoes the necessary education and purgation. Origen carefully calibrates his cosmology and theology. He portrays God as a compassionate and judicious teacher, physician, and father who employs suffering for our amelioration.

Journey Back to God frames the systematic study of Origen's theodicy within a broader theory of theodicy as navigation, which signifies the dynamic process whereby we impute meaning to suffering. It unites the logical and spiritual facets of his theodicy, and situates it in its third-century historical, theological, and philosophical context, correcting the distortions that continue to plague Origen scholarship. Furthermore, the study clarifies his ambiguous position on universalism within the context of his eschatology. Finally, it assesses the cogency and contemporary relevance of Origen's theodicy, highlighting the problems and prospects of his bold, constructive, and optimistic vision.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

I am delighted to be putting the finishing touches on the upcoming fall issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the oldest academic revue of its kind in North America whose editor I am. We have two interesting articles, several shorter essays, and a nice array of book reviews and notices.

Articles:

The lead article is especially fascinating: it treats relations between Orthodox and Greek Catholic clergy in Soviet Ukraine, showing the messiness and complexity of those relations after the forced pseudo-sobor of 1946. Some UGCC clergy wanted to regard others who went over to Russian Orthodoxy as "Judases" while others had a much more sympathetic view and co-operated with them unofficially at the parish level. Entitled "After 'Reunion': Soviet Power and the 'Reunited' and 'Non-Reunited' Greek Catholic Clergy in Eastern Galicia (1950s-1960s)," the article is written by Kateryna Budz, a doctoral candidate in history at the National University of
Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and, until the end of this month, holder of a scholarship at the Max Planck Institute
for Social Anthropology in Germany. She draws on original archival research in a variety of repositories in Ukraine to see what official records among Soviet state agencies reveal as well as ecclesial bodies and their own archives. Some figures in this story are well known--e.g., Josyf Slipyj--but others have not received much scholarly attention until now.

The second article by Timothy Wilkinson treats the phenomenon of Christians appropriating Jewish traditions as seen in the popularity of celebrating a "seder" supper in many Protestant traditions over the last two decades.Entitled "The Contemporary Protestant Seder: An Orthodox Critique," the article reviews the rise of seder suppers and what they say about a late-modern Christian understanding of church and Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations ancient and modern, and contemporary Western liturgical theology, which is critiqued gently in light of such Orthodox figures at Alexander Schmemann. Notes/Essays/Lectures:

In the Notes/Essays/Lectures section, we feature three pieces. The first is an up-to-the-moment report from Andriy Chirovsky on the recent patriarchal sobor and synod of bishops, both held in and for the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in Ivano-Frankivsk this August.

The second is a short excerpt from my lecture at OTSA at Fordham this past June in which I treat the questions of memory and "forgetting" in Orthodox-Catholic relations, focusing on the upcoming 70th anniversary in 2016 of the pseudo-sobor of Lviv which saw the Stalin-approved destruction of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church with the collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church.This is a

Finally, Augustine Casiday, author of the invaluable landmark work Reconstructing the Theology of Evagrius Ponticus: Beyond Heresy (whom I interviewed about this very book here) has a fascinating and learned essay treating the uses and abuses of Evagrius' famous definition of theology and a theologian from his treatise On Prayer. This maxim, which I have myself quoted regularly, and which seems to be a staple of contemporary Eastern spiritual and apologetical literature, is often used as little more than a thinly disguised sneer at intellectual work--as a cloak for anti-intellectual obscurantism in other words. Casiday's treatment of what Evagrius really meant is important and not to be missed.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

It's hard to believe it was a full year ago since I was in Brookline for the annual meeting of the Orthodox Theological Society of America, where I was an invited panelist and respondent to Paul Gavrilyuk's excellent book, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. (I posted my response here.)

Now we are told that in December, a more affordable paperback version of the book is to be published so you really do have no excuse for not getting a copy!

This is a major study of the man widely regarded as the most influential Russian theologian of the 20th century. It raises acute issues not only about Florovsky but about many other matters--historiography, Russian culture, Orthodox identity and engagement with both Western and "Eurasian" culture, etc.

As the publisher told us about this book when it first appeared:

Georges Florovsky is the mastermind of a "return to the Church Fathers" in twentieth-century Orthodox theology. His theological vision--the neopatristic synthesis--became the main paradigm of Orthodox theology and the golden standard of Eastern Orthodox identity in the West. Focusing on Florovsky's European period (1920-1948), this study analyzes how Florovsky's evolving interpretation of Russian religious thought, particularly Vladimir Solovyov and Sergius Bulgakov, informed his approach to patristic sources. Paul Gavrilyuk offers a new reading of Florovsky's neopatristic theology, by closely considering its ontological, epistemological, and ecclesiological foundations.

It is common to contrast Florovsky's neopatristic theology with the "modernist" religious philosophies of Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, and other representatives of the Russian Religious Renaissance. Gavrilyuk argues that the standard narrative of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, based on this polarization, must be reconsidered. The author demonstrates Florovsky's critical appropriation of the main themes of the Russian Religious Renaissance, including theological antinomies, the meaning of history, and the nature of personhood. The distinctive features of Florovsky's neopatristic theology--Christological focus, "ecclesial experience," personalism, and "Christian Hellenism"--are best understood against the background of the main problematic of the Renaissance. Specifically, it is shown that Bulgakov's sophiology provided a polemical subtext for Florovsky's theology of creation. It is argued that the use of the patristic norm in application to modern Russian theology represents Florovsky's theological signature.

Drawing on unpublished archival material and correspondence, this study sheds new light on such aspects of Florovsky's career as his family background, his participation in the Eurasian movement, his dissertation on Alexander Herzen, his lectures on Vladimir Solovyov, and his involvement in Bulgakov's Brotherhood of St Sophia.

Monday, October 26, 2015

I was delighted recently to receive in the mail from St. Vladimir Seminary Press a new book that I said more than ten years ago needed to be written. In the early part of the last decade I was taking a graduate class on the Desert Fathers/Mothers, and trying to see connections between the "psychology" of such monastics as Evagrius and the world of the twenty-first century, especially in the aftermath of Freud. I was greatly attracted to the vision of "interiorized monasticism" that Paul Evdokimov touched upon in his lovely and lyrical (but not unproblematical) book The Sacrament of Love, but found that vision underdeveloped and not adequately "translated" and thus made accessible to non-scholars today.

Now, however, we happily have a very useful and edifying attempt to link the wisdom of desert monasticism to the world of our own day in a way that does not require all of us to flee to real deserts or try to climb atop a stylus somewhere. That book is A Layman in the Desert: Monastic Wisdom for a Life in the World (SVS Press, 2015; 201pp.) by Daniel Opperwall, whom I asked for an interview. Here are his thoughts.AD: Tell us about your background

DO: I was born and raised in suburban Detroit. I was
baptized Presbyterian as a baby, but my family stopped going to church at all
when I was about six. I got a really excellent education that left me
interested in philosophy and literature. As most teenagers interested in that
kind of thing, I decided to be an atheist for a time. In my early twenties,
though, as I kept on reading, atheism became more and more absurd to me, and
Jesus Christ became more and more compelling. But a lot of the Christianity I
knew still seemed off. Then I encountered Orthodoxy, and everything connected.
So, I converted.

DO: There is a big trend in the Orthodox Church of people
getting interested in patristic literature and monastic spirituality. But people
often struggle when they are reading this stuff--they worry that maybe it's
impossible to seek salvation without becoming a monk or a nun. It seemed to me
that the problem comes when we fail to assess the core teachings being shared
in this kind of literature so as to appropriately translate them into our real
lives. How do I seek detachment while owning a car? How do I seek chastity if I
am married and thus have sex? We cannot just try to do what ancient monks did--our
lives don't permit that. So, we have to seek the same holiness as they did, but
through our own lives as we really live them (not, that is, in spite of those lives). I
decided to look at John Cassian's Conferences to see how that might be
possible. Layman is what came out.

AD: Some might be puzzled by the
seeming paradox in your sub-title: monastic
wisdom for a life in the world. Don’t
we all assume that monks are supposed to be world-fleeing and world-denying?

Well, for one thing, the notion that there is a great
chasm between monastics and the rest of the world is far less true than we
sometimes imagine, and it was, if anything, even less true in the ancient
world. The ancient monks, even hermits, were constantly receiving news and
visits--they were very engaged. So, one thing that became important in Layman
was simply bringing forward what St John already says about worldly
life--he knew a lot about it. But still, there is a difference here. The
ancient hermits were trying to get away from the world as much as they could.
Yet, they came to tremendous wisdom about God and human beings--wisdom that
applies to everyone no matter what their situation. Layman is precisely
about getting at that insight--that wisdom--and developing a theory of how to
bring it back into our lives in the world. I hope that task seems a bit less
paradoxical in light of the book, and I hope this is far from the last word we
see on it.

AD: Your Athonite interlocutor,
quoted in your preface, notes that a “monastery” is simply a place where people
help one another unto salvation—just as a family does together. But why do you
think that many people either fail to realize that, or otherwise assume that a
family is a “lesser” calling?

I think it is a natural mistake to see monastics as
special. There are far fewer of them then us, and nobody is born a monk or nun.
We also tend to mistakenly equate Church-related things for the work of being
Christian. So, since monastics spend far more time in church, we think of them
as somehow more Christian. If we are only Christian in church, though, then
there is no hope for anyone. And, honestly, the Church could do a much better
job of disavowing people of these ideas. We have far too little material on
married saints, for example--and what we have often involves couples living in
celibacy so that they are basically just monastics again! The priest I met on
Mt Athos knew far too much about real monastic life to fall into these traps,
but for us lay people monks and nuns often remain mystical super-humans. We
have to stop thinking like that.

AD: You note that Orthodox today do
not want for practical books on fasting, praying the Jesus prayer at work,
moral isues, or generally leading a life in the world; but that of those many
books, few focus on what the “essential spiritual character and purpose” of a
lay life is. Tell us how you understand that character and purpose.

The driving realization of Layman is that we,
as lay people, have to be seeking our salvation through our lives in the
world, not just in those moments of prayer or going to church. We have to be
growing closer to Christ when mowing the lawn, cooking dinner, going to work,
going to the bank. If we can't find ways to do that, then there really is no
hope for us. Our purpose is nothing short of theosisin Christ--that is
God's purpose for all people. But we are being asked to seek that in the world most
of the time rather than through obviously religious things--that is the
challenging character of our spirituality.

AD: You also note that we do not want
for books, especially recent translations, of wisdom from desert fathers and
mothers, but we do want for books translating that wisdom into an idiom for our
own day. Why have we waited so long for a book such as yours? What has
prevented others from undertaking such efforts as yours?

When it comes to the English-speaking Church, I think
our writers and scholars have just had other priorities so far. I don't blame
them for that. It was not long ago that we had virtually no books in English
about Orthodox theology, church history, liturgics. We got some of those, so
then we started working on translations of our classic writings, and that work
has borne fruit only in the last few years. Now that we have our feet on the
ground with those more essential things, we can start getting into the nuanced
conversations about the shape of Orthodox life in the modern West.

AD: As you combed through the vast
literature on desert wisdom, you came to focus in particular on John Cassian: The Conferences. Tell us,
first, how you came to focus on him rather than other desert fathers and
mothers.

The Conferencesmaintain a beautiful balance
between accessibility and depth. A collection like the The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, for instance, would be hard to write about since it is all short
snippets without many sustained themes or discussions. Conversely, the Philokalia
is utterly vast, and often almost esoteric. The Conferences falls
right in between so that there is enough to dig into for a book like this, but
it remains approachable for those without lots of theological training. It also
appealed to me because it bridges the East/West divide that we too often set up
in thinking about Orthodox history. The Conferences is part of the full
Orthodox heritage--east and west.

AD: Next, if you would, tell us a bit
about the man and those Conferences.

St John is something of a mystery in a lot of ways. We
can say just a few things with certainty. He spent a lot of time in several
monasteries in Egypt, and travelled among the desert hermits there (whose
teachings he records in the Conferences). At some point he went to Gaul
(modern France) to set up several monasteries near Marseilles. That is around
the time that he wrote the Conferences. We are not sure if he grew up
speaking Latin or Greek, but he seems to have known both very well by the time
he started writing (the Conferences are originally in Latin). St John
can be a very beautiful, and remarkably honest writer. In the Conferences,
he records accounts of what several desert hermits said to him and his friend
Germanus as they went through the desert. He often records the questions that
Germanus asks, and many of them can be challenging, critical, flippant, even
slightly annoyed and funny. Sometimes St John will even express uncertainty
about a teaching or situation--he does not try to make everything seem
clear-cut. Because of all that, when reading the Conferences one really
gets the feeling of sitting at the feet of the elders, talking back and forth
with them. They feel like human beings, not impossible spiritual super-heroes.
It's a beautiful way of recording all this ancient wisdom, and that is a big
part of why the Conferences became some of the most influential texts in
the development of Christian monasticism.

My main hope is to start a conversation that lets us
put lay spirituality into better focus. I'm not trying to transform the
spiritual lives of lay people, or give them a different role in the Church, or
anything like that; I want us to better understand the role that we lay people
already play--the spiritual lives we are already living--and therefore try to
strengthen them. So, to that end, I think basically any serious Orthodox lay
person, and probably a good number of Catholics, would benefit from giving it a
read. Other Christians might get a lot of food for thought as well, though the
monastic tradition might seem a little more unusual to many Protestants and
others.

At the moment I have been thinking a lot about the
Council of Chalcedon, in fact. I've just finished presenting at a conference on
healing the Chalcedonian schism, and I will be teaching a course on the subject
as well in January. So, that's a change of pace--back into heavy historical
theology.

I haven't settled on a next book, but I am thinking very seriously
about writing one on the Rule of St Benedict that would be in a similar vein to
A Layman in the Desert. I'd like to explore how the Rule can be
conceptually translated to help inform life in a family home rather than a
monastery. My spiritual father is a Benedictine monk (yes there are Orthodox Benedictine monks!), and St Benedict drew a lot from St John Cassian, so it
would be a natural next step.

Friday, October 23, 2015

As I've noted on here many times before, military history has long fascinated me, including the oft-overlooked but deeply significant Crimean War. Orlando Figes book on that war was noted here. I have picked it up again several times over the last few years, and always find it a fascinating read. He does not ignore the role of the Orthodox Church, especially in Russia, which is refreshing to see even if it does not occupy central place in his narrative.

During the mid-19th century, the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East found themselves at the centre of a bitter struggle for control between five empires – Russia, Britain, France, Austria, and the Ottoman government itself. This book traces the history of the international crisis over Orthodox Christendom from its origins in the 1820s-1830s to its partial resolution in the 1860s. It explains how and why the temporal powers exercised by the Orthodox Church led to an escalating series of diplomatic confrontations that reached their acme in the 1850s with the outbreak of the Crimean War and a concerted campaign by the Great Powers to secularize and laicize the non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

In his address of last Saturday, the bishop of Rome laid out a vision of synodality for the Latin Church that is striking and surprising.....only to those who haven't been paying attention. For those who have attended not only to Francis but also to (admittedly slow-moving) trajectories in Catholic ecclesiology for a half-century now, this vision is not really a surprise. Perhaps the only surprise is that it is this pope, rather than his immediate predecessor who wrote so much about ecclesial reforms, who is enacting a vision of synodality now.

In the book and elsewhere I have tried to stress, especially to Catholics worried about the dangers of synodality, that there is no one model all must follow. If we look to the East, we find a diversity of structures arranged according to need, context, and history. Moreover, it is very important to note that a properly functioning synodal structure can only come about where both synod and primate are functioning together. A strong primate (whether diocesan bishop, patriarch, pope, or catholicos) is needed for synods at every level. A synod does not exist at the expense of a primate, but only in concert with him, each acting as a check on the other. In this light, there is no reason to believe that a more robust synodality in the West would in itself weaken either the papacy or more generally the Catholic Church. Her problems are already significant and longstanding, and they have come not in the presence of robust synodality but in its absence; they have come in a time of papal centralization and maximalization.

To hear some Catholics describe it, you would think "synodality" is a synonym for "oligarchy" or, worse, little more than mob rule. To hear other, only slightly less deranged Catholics describe it, "synodality" is a synonym for that fatuous old bogeyman, "conciliarism," a word nobody should again be permitted to utter until and unless they have, at a minimum, read Francis Oakley's explosive book The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870. (I give you some of the unnerving details in my review here.)

The plain fact of the matter is that, for all the bluster about how much of a "revolutionary" this pope is, in his discussions of synodality, at least, he is deeply traditional. In looking to recover synodality he is looking to tradition for inspiration, following, I would suggest, Congar's "grande loi d'un réformisme catholique" which consists of "commencer par un retour aux principes du catholicisme. Il faudra d'abord interroger la tradition, se replonger en elle."
Again, for those paying attention (Congar's French original came out in 1950), this is not a surprise.

If I had endless money and endless time, I would spend both in any number of archives--Vatican, Ottoman, Churchill, and many others--ferreting out some of the golden eggs of insight, scandal, or amusement they doubtless still withhold from us, or being amazed at the lacuna in their holdings. To anyone who has ever done archival research, the idea that they are simple, innocent, objective, comprehensive repositories--mere bank vaults for everything every written on a topic--is of course nonsense. What makes it into the archives is as important a question as what does not. Who determines the nature of the collection determines in significant part the history that gets written on the basis of those archives.

Published this summer is a book that looks fascinating because of the complex intersection of religious history in the hands of official atheists:

What can atheists tell us about religious life? Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, Sonja Luehrmann argues that we can learn a great deal about Soviet religiosity when we focus not just on what documents say but also on what they did. Especially during the post-war decades (1950s-1970s), the puzzle of religious persistence under socialism challenged atheists to develop new approaches to studying and theorizing religion while also trying to control it. Taking into account the logic of filing systems as well as the content of documents, the book shows how documentary action made religious believers firmly a part of Soviet society while simultaneously casting them as ideologically alien. When juxtaposed with oral, printed, and samizdat sources, the records of institutions such as the Council of Religious Affairs and the Communist Party take on a dialogical quality. In distanced and carefully circumscribed form, they preserve traces of encounters with religious believers. By contrast, collections compiled by western supporters during the Cold War sometimes lack this ideological friction, recruiting Soviet believers into a deceptively simple binary of religion versus communism. Through careful readings and comparisons of different documentary genres and depositories, this book opens up a difficult set of sources to students of religion and secularism.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The more I read about the so-called justice system in the United States (the influence of which is spreading around the world in unhelpful ways), the more the problems become evident--problems whose seriousness is only magnified incalculably when the death penalty is on the table. What are Christians of all traditions doing to challenge the state and reform its penal processes in a humane way? Friends who have been involved in prison chaplaincy tell me that the Christian presence in too many penitentiaries in this country is virtually non-existent, which is a great shame on the Church.

Too often it seems we lock people away and forget about them, entrusting them to the tender mercies of the nation-state. That Christians today are willing to give obeisance to an all-powerful state and its organs is a shocking form of borderline idolatry, as William Cavanaugh, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre and others have been arguing for thirty years. A book coming out in November challenges Christian anew in this regard: Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2015), 320pp.

About this updated version the publisher tells us:

The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor's award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of "Lockdown America" and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a "theatrics of state terror," Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the US a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a "counter-theatrics to state terror," a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples' movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms "a liberating material spirituality" to unseat the state that kills.

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About Me

I am the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy; a tenured associate professor and chairman of the Dept. of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and a subdeacon of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) resident in the Eparchy of St. Nicholas of Chicago.